American Comparative Literature Association 2012

The presidential theme of the ACLA 2012 was "Collapse/Catastrophe/Change".From the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 to 9/11 to the recent upheavals in the Middle East, the language of collapse and catastrophe, of crisis and change has come to dominate the public sphere. What figures and tropes produce and recuperate such events? How have they been represented differently in different periods and across linguistic and national boundaries? Economic meltdown, financial collapse, environmental depletion and disaster, trauma, the crisis in the humanities, in the foreign languages, in comparative literature itself: we are besieged by a discourse of crisis. At the same time, discourse itself seems to be in crisis, on the brink of collapse from the strain of having to reinvent itself with each new cataclysm without becoming redundant or incommensurate. What remains of terms like “revolution,” “democracy,” “justice,” “tragedy,” “community,” “freedom”? How are they mediated culturally? nationally? globally? Can the literary re-imagine so as to renew? What is the relation between figuration and change?